.
Dilorè’s first words left me speechless for a moment. It took a few seconds to regroup and reply.
“It has only been since this morning, My Lady. Why are you yelling?”
“I’ve been trying to contact you for hours! I’m ready to go down to look for you!”
I rested my forehead in my hand. In retrospect, I probably should have called Dilorè and informed her about where we were heading, before going through the portal into the small world. I had known it was likely that the spirits wouldn’t be able to communicate, after all.
Suddenly, I felt like Robert as a teenager, when he forgot to contact his mother. I found that fact annoying, but I also felt guilty for worrying my cousin, since it was my fault, after all.
“I’m sorry,” I told her while bowing my head (uselessly, since she couldn’t see me.) “It would be difficult to explain why, right now, but we had to go out of range to reach the princess and Lady Chiara. They are safe, and hidden from the demons for the time being.”
“Out of range? How is that possible?” she demanded.
“We… passed a barrier the spirits can’t communicate through. It is providing the princess with safety, so it can’t be helped.”
She was silent for a bit, then laid the question aside in order to ask, “How quickly can you get her to the surface?”
“Right now, we really can’t,” I admitted.
I couldn’t even get Brigitte and Amelia out of the pleasure dome. Lady Chiara had entered the way I had, but the method of ‘have the land-lubbers hold their breath while we tow them through the water’ just didn’t seem practicable. Diving fifteen paces and swimming thirty, then surfacing… I could only predict drowning them as a result.
Do it anyway, then revive them with [Healing]? It seemed like too much of a risk. [Healing] can do a lot, but it can’t resurrect a dead person.
I ended her protests with the worst of the news. “According to an ally we’ve encountered, there is both an archdemon and an archfiend in the cavern.”
“There is what?”
“I haven’t confirmed them yet, but if it’s true, we can’t take her out the way we came in.”
“Who is this ally?”
I sighed. “A very powerful mage. I’m trusting him for now because he rescued Amelia and Chiara. And he is protecting them now. They ended up here because he led them through Ilim Below to escape, but ran into demons on the way and had to detour.”
She didn’t respond for several seconds. When she did, she was calmer, and had a reasonable question. “Is there another way out from where you are?”
According to my mental map, a few other entrances down from the surface above also existed, but I had no idea if either end of them was unblocked. Thanks to continental drift, my knowledge of their locations was uncertain. Another entrance to the main cavern was in the eastern main tunnel, but it connected to the underground highway that Diur led Amelia and Chiara through, to reach this place from the Berado tribal lands.
The place where more demons lurked, and wanted her back.
I also suspected that the demons were reaching Berado using that highway, after reaching the main cavern from a similar highway that came down from the north. It would explain why they wanted the mine in Lisrau sealed, if it was on their invasion route..
The highway would be too restrictive for moving large numbers of demons quickly. They were taking over Gado and planning to use it and this massive cavern as a major staging area, to serve as a bridgehead on the eastern side of the Great Wall for a major invasion. How they were getting into Ilim Below in the first place was still an unanswered question.
“Other paths are riskier than attempting to go out the way we came in,” I stated. “We should let them stay safe here for now. We have to deal with the demons first.”
“Well, I made a start on that already,” she stated.
“Huh?” I blinked. “What kind of a start?”
“I’ve had a very busy day. This morning I flew the son of the Gado chieftain over the mountain to meet with Prince Rufin. I fully described the ‘mine’ to him again, complete with demons. Unfortunately, His Highness only agreed to talk, so I had to leave the Gado boy there to negotiate. While returning, I stumbled across those imps on their way back from surveying the mountain pass, so I killed them.”
With a shudder, I retorted, “Dilorè! What if you put them on alert while we’re down here?”
“Put them on alert for what?” she replied innocently. “They were in the open, and had the bad luck to encounter a passing fairy. I was nowhere near any mine.”
I couldn’t protest. She had a point.
She continued, “Allia and I decided that the best thing I could do with the three bodies was deliver them. I dropped one off with the Amaga chief, one with the Gado chief, and I’m now flying to Dausindiu to drop the last off with the king of Arelia. I was leaning toward dropping it off with Matthias, but it might impress the king more to bring it directly to him. It should be easy to find his bedchamber, and Matthias already believes us, anyhow.”
The fairy approach to negotiation is wonderfully in-your-face. I actually giggled a bit.
She added, “Demons overrunning a weak territory right next door is an existential threat to both nations. They can’t possibly leave the Gado to defend against it on their own, after seeing this and hearing my report.”
I worried, “We need to secure the entrance before any invasion force comes into Gado territory. They are bound to have a plan to seal it if it’s in danger of falling into mortal hands, just like they did in Lisrau.”
“That will happen soon,” Dilorè answered. “I had a look at that mountain pass on the way back. It’s ready to open. Once a team of mages clears it, Rufin can move his troops in the next few days, if the King in Dausindiu is convinced.”
“He has enough mages with him?” I answered, surprised. I had seen the typical small number of average power specialists, but I didn’t think they were capable of large-scale excavation work.
“He has our help. Allia, Talene, Ceria, Arken and myself,” she answered. “We want you guys out, as fast as possible, after all”
“So you’re the communication link for all of this negotiating?”
“I’m firing myself from that job as we speak. I went to Greenwater Fen first to get some of those communication tools from them. I gave one to the Gado chief, one to Prince Rufin, and I have tools for the Arelian king and us.”
“Who has the other end of those tools?”
They weren’t cell phones. They only connected to their mate.
“The Amaga commanders. They volunteered, since they have a lot of experience using them to coordinate battles.”
I saw that during the battle at Greenwater. They directed their forces like a modern Earth military, linking each unit to their company command and each company to headquarters. But it occurred to me, she probably didn’t realize she was putting the Amaga in the leading role that way. I hoped Rufin and his brother the king had a link of their own, because having to go through a foreign intermediary to communicate with each other would annoy them.
She continued, “So your ally says there’s an archdemon, but you haven’t seen proof?”
“That’s right.”
“The word of someone she doesn’t know isn’t going to work for Allia,” she predicted. “You better confirm the situation yourself.”
I sighed. I had been thinking the same thing, because I didn’t necessarily trust Diur’s word, either.
“I’ll do that,” I told her. “I’ll call you again when I’m back.”
I tapped on Lucy’s pouch and said, “I’m done. End the call.”
The mini-pixie appeared and asked. “Go out?”
She’d been paying attention. Well, she’d been the one relaying the call, after all.
“That’s right. Why don’t you stay in the stone while I do this? It would be bad if a demon spotted you.”
With a nod, she flew back in.
I didn’t want to go through that labyrinth of corridors for this, so I flew to where the lake poured into the passage directly back to the cavern. At twelve paces wide, it was easy to simply fly through it. Below me, but thanks to the tilt, most of the stair-stepped stream was dry while the low edge was a rivulet that had worn a deep groove into the impossibly tough material. Even the mighty works of Gaia had to bow to the march of time eventually. Only spiritual vessels last forever.
Even so, it was impressive that it had only eroded its way a half-pace lower than Gaia’s original channel.
The parkways on either side of the stream bed were no longer covered in moonglow grass. The brown-green moss of the pleasure dome was gone as well. Instead, the same mosses that covered the walls and ceiling were covering the ground.
Once I reached almost a half mile down the passage, I reached the water’s edge. Naturally, I continued to have enough air to fly for many more paces, but after I passed over several submerged ‘stair steps’, the headroom became tight and the water was deep enough, so I dematerialized my wings and plunged in.
I began the water-breathing skill almost without thinking. I was on a simple, straight-ahead course, in a gradual descent, so I could entirely concentrate on Grandmother’s swimming technique this time. It had already clicked a bit before I left the water last time, thanks to the extra effort required to reach the surface while wearing my gear. As I found that same feeling while gravity was working in my favor, my speed rose dramatically, catching me by surprise. Thanks to the greater drag on the side with my belt-wallet, I veered toward the wall and had to quickly correct.
But instincts were kicking in and my speed increased further. I began truly feeling the streaming water as a part of my body. A bit more than two minutes after I first hit the water, I emerged from the passage, back into the main tunnel.
My vampire sense spread out through the aquatic darkness, finding fish and other denizens easily. I turned away from the ‘island’ I was heading toward, where I had departed earlier, and into the curving end tunnel.
I wasn’t moving my body through the water as much as I was moving the water around me through the water. As I fine tuned the shape of the water around me, I slowly found the shape that worked the best, and learned to bend that shape to change my direction of travel.
Grandmother had assured me that it was an instinct I would find eventually, but I’d had the impression it would take a lot more practice than this. Especially since controlling Tiana’s wings and using them to fly had taken close to a year of practice before she was truly proficient.
I suspected Senhion. During reconstruction after the Ice Age, she had lived almost entirely underwater, as one of Eurybia’s troubleshooters in the Eastern Sea, so she had become very skilled at open water swimming.
As I streamed past a small lake monster, who was clearly spooked by the disturbance in the water despite my cloak, I heard a sigh and a tired voice in my head. It was a silent communication like the ones that Serera and others had sent me in the past.
“I really had hoped you would listen to my advice, My Lady. Why are you such a willful child?”
